
(Alan Copson/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis)
Located at the access to Portland Harbor, Portland Head Lighthouse is the oldest alarm in the accompaniment of Maine—and one of the oldest in the absolute United States.Commissioned by George Washington even afore the federal government officially existed, and while Maine was still a allotment of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, architecture for the alarm began in 1787 and was completed three years later.Frugally-minded Washington apprenticed workers to assemble the lighthouse from bounded rubblestones calm from the bank and fields.The consistent belfry still stands, one of alone a scattering of colonial-era lighthouses that accept never been broken down and rebuilt.
Although Maine isn't usually anticipation of as a Civil War battleground, the northernmost argosy action of the Civil War occurred appropriate off the bank of Portland Head.On the night of June 26, 1863, Charles W.Read, a Confederate additional lieutenant, and his aggregation bearded as fishermen, snuck accomplished the alarm and into Portland anchorage aboard a baseborn vessel. Read's plan was to accroach the Caleb Cushing, a well-armed United States Revenue Cutter, sail it cautiously to open water, and then return the aforementioned night to assail the city-limits and burn the anchorage and gunboats beneath architecture there.
Under awning of darkness, Read's rebels auspiciously took the Caleb Cushing without resistance, but as they attempted to captain out of the harbor, the rebels apparent the bay's tides had angry adjoin them, slowing their escape and authoritative it absurd to acknowledgment the aforementioned night.By dawn, Portlanders apparent the missing address and a quickly accumulated regiment of soldiers, noncombatant volunteers (and a assumption band) set off in following aboard a steamer.The wind accepted poor and the Cushing was bound overtaken.After backbreaking their accumulation of armament (not alive a abstruse alcove in the address hid a lot of of the ship's gunpowder) Read and his aggregation were captured after setting the barge on blaze in an attack to escape by lifeboat.
"It's simple for us to smile about it now," says Portland historian Herb Adams said on a affairs on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, "but [Read's] designs were actually serious. And had he succeeded this would accept been advised one of the abundant calamities of the Civil War."
The alarm has aswell aggressive arcane references; artist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would generally appointment the alarm —some anticipate his composition "The Lighthouse" describes Portland Head with its curve "a dim, gigantic shape, Holding its lantern o’er the active sea." Other artists accept been aggressive by the alarm as well—it was the arena of Edward Hopper's Portland Head-Light, and is still one of the a lot of photographed lighthouses in Maine.
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